Los and Amor

This story is a supernatural what-if sequel to Amor Patrius and continues the story of Los and Lila from Hell is Suffering. Reading both first is recommended.

The call came just after three.

Belgrand listened, smiled, and hung up without saying thank you. Through the glass wall of the penthouse the park lay open in the afternoon light. Paths. Benches. The dark cluster of metal at the center.

Amor Patrius.

Even from this height he could see the details. Three pigs. Gold body locked between them. The monument had been silent for two days. No more scheduled moaning. No more little theater for tourists who thought the sounds were a trick of the motors.

The girl was dead.

He poured a drink and did not sit. He had waited years for a real Lexicon and never found one. Shops that were not there the next morning. Men who smiled too wide and sold him junk. Stories that promised forbidden gifts if you only finished the puzzle.

He found what information he could and built his own.

Suffering poured into a public work until the vessel failed. Death as the last turn of the last segment. It was inelegant. It was also, as of this afternoon, complete.

“Come on then,” he said to the empty room. “I did my part.”

The air over the rug ripped open with a wet metallic sound.

Chains uncoiled and filled the room. Something like a man stepped through after them.

Black leather hanging in long panels. Old blades at the waist. Bald head. Skin the color of paper left in a drawer. Ritual cuts mapped across the face. Black eyes with no bottom to them. Behind the skull, a dark iron ring held in place by spikes driven inward.

A woman came with him.

Long black hair. Face gone pale, pure white. Tight red leather. Hook wounds in her shoulders, her sides, her thighs, still open, thin lines of blood running as if the injuries had never learned how to close. Chains hung from the hooks and dragged behind her, a dress made of metal that followed when she walked. Rings sat at her throat, her wrists, her ankles. Belgrand could see the outline of others under her leather.

He laughed once, bright with relief.

“I knew it. I knew the stories were true.”

Los looked at him the way a clerk looks at a form filled out in the wrong ink.

“We are Los,” he said. “We answer the call of the Lexicon.”

“Yes. Good. I’ve been trying to find you for years. Do you understand that? Years. People sell toys. They sell rumors. No one sells the real thing.” Belgrand set the glass down without drinking. His hands had started to shake and he did not care. “I want what was promised. The deepest desire. That is the deal. I completed the work. I paid in full.”

The woman said nothing. Her eyes had already left his face. She was looking past him, through the glass, at the park.

Los was quiet long enough that the penthouse ventilation became the loudest thing in the room.

“You completed nothing,” he said. “You built a counterfeit and filled it with a life that was never asked.”

Belgrand blinked. The smile tried to stay on.

“She was the offering. The art was the ritual. It worked. You’re standing in my living room.”

“Hell does not take,” Los said. The voice did not rise. That was the worst part of it. “Hell receives. You forced a door and shoved a soul through it that had no chance to answer. That is not a summons. That is theft.”

“I waited until she died. That was the rite. That was—”

A chain moved.

It went into him below the sternum and came out with a wet, heavy pull, bringing a shining rope of intestine with it. Belgrand made a sound that never became a word. A second chain hooked what the first had started and tore sideways. His belly opened. Heat poured down his legs. He looked down at himself as if the problem might still be negotiable.

Los stood still and silent.

The chains went to work. They hauled the rest of Belgrand’s gut out onto the white rug in two more hard yanks and left him standing in the ruin of it for a second, still trying to hold his own insides like a man gathering dropped papers. Then his knees went. He sat down in himself. The bleeding was enormous and fast. His mouth opened. Nothing useful came out.

He died looking at Los’s face, still waiting for the part where his desire got named.

The chains withdrew.

Lila walked around the body without stepping in it. She stopped at the glass.

Down in the park the sculpture sat in the sun, gold and pigs and the black pedestal, tourists the size of lint on the paths. From here it looked exactly as it had been built to look. A gift to the city. Fatherly love. A thing that did not ask anyone anything.

She watched it for a long moment.

“We have a problem,” she said.

Los followed her gaze. He did not ask which problem. The monument was still down there. The girl was not in it. The books were not clean.

The tear in the air stayed open behind them, and the park kept being a park, and the dead man on the rug kept being proof that wanting a story was not the same as being allowed to write one.

The park was empty after midnight.

Path lamps made small circles on the grass. The sculpture sat in the middle of them like it always had. Gold. Pigs. Pedestal. A plaque nobody read in the dark. Two days without the motors. Two days without the sound people used to argue about on the benches.

The air in front of the piece ripped open.

Chains came through first. Then Los. Then Lila, the metal behind her whispering over the concrete of the path.

She examined the monument. “There,” she said.

Los did not answer. The chains did.

They hit the nearest pig at the shoulder and tore it off the assembly with a scream of stressed bolts. The second pig went over on its side and took a slab of gold plate with it. The third, the one mounted at the face, ripped free last. The hollow cock that had been her throat tore out of the housing in a dry grind of metal on metal.

What was left on the pedestal was not a statue.

A woman’s body, fused in places to broken gold, holes still stretched in the shapes the pigs had forced them. The skin that showed between the cracked plates was gray. The mouth hung open around nothing. Concrete had dried in a pale crust at the lips and at the other openings they had used to fill her.

Lila stepped in close enough to see the work.

“She has been gone long enough,” she said.

“Long enough to finish their theft,” Los said. “Not long enough to be finished with us.”

Chains slid under the body and lifted. Gold plates sheared off and rang on the pedestal. A section of fused cladding stayed on one thigh and came with her, then cracked and dropped. They took the corpse through the tear.

The park air closed.

In the morning there would be wreckage and a missing centerpiece and a story about vandals. Tonight there was only the dark, and the plaque in the grass, and three metal pigs lying where they had been thrown.

Hell did not bother imitating a room.

Walls that were almost geometry. Distance that refused to stay put. The floor under Emily was cold and not quite stone.

She came back in pieces.

First the fact of a chest. Then the ugly effort of trying to use it. Concrete had set in her throat and in the pipes behind it. She rolled onto her side and the first cough tore something loose that was not phlegm and not food. Gray sludge hit the floor in a wet slab. She gagged and coughed again. A thicker mass followed, grit in it, the same material they had pumped through her when the last crew decided the plumbing was finished.

She could not stop.

It came up out of her stomach and her gut in long, ugly heaves. Her rebuilt body remembered the route. She clawed at the floor and spat until her mouth tasted like dust and old water and the inside of a pipe.

When it was done she was naked on her hands and knees in a puddle of what had killed her. Her throat worked. Air went down a passage that was only flesh. She could close her mouth. She could feel her tongue.

She sat back on her heels.

Skin. Not gold. Legs that folded because she told them to. Between them, a body that was open in the ordinary way, sore in places that had been stretched for years and then packed and then emptied. No screens over her eyes. She was looking at a place that did not pretend to be a park.

Los stood over her. Lila a step to the side, chains quiet against the floor.

Emily’s voice came out raw.

“Am I dead?”

“You were,” Los said. “That part was done correctly. The rest was not.”

She stared at him. The face was the one from no dream she had been allowed. The ring behind his head. The cuts. She looked at the woman and could not make the hooks make sense.

“Who are you?”

“We are Los. We answer what should have been a Lexicon. What held you was a counterfeit. It took a life that was never offered a question. Hell received you as stolen property. That is a deficit.”

Emily wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Gray smeared across her wrist. She looked at it like it belonged to someone else.

“My father made that thing.”

“His hands made it,” Los said. “Another man aimed it. His account is closed. Yours is not. You were poured full and left. You were never asked.”

Lila’s voice was lower. “You died inside a fake door. That is why you are on this floor coughing rock instead of staying gone.”

Emily swallowed. The swallow hurt and she could have wept from the simple fact of it. “Wait.”

Neither answered.

“I'm here because you're pissed about a fucking copyright infringement?”

Lila glanced at Los, then smiled. “Yes. I guess you could say that.”

Los’s gaze turned to Lila as he spoke to the naked girl on the ground. “Crude and simple, but sufficient for you.”

Emily trembled as she stared between them. “What do you want?”

Los looked at her with the same attention he had given the dead man on the white rug.

“The Lexicon exists to ask a question,” he said. “Say yes and be free. That question was denied you. Balance requires that it be offered now.”

The corridor held still around them. Emily’s naked body shook once, from cold or from the aftertaste of cement, and she did not look away from him.

Lila crouched so Emily had to see her mouth when she spoke.

“You asked what we want. That is the wrong question. The right one is whether you will answer.”

Emily’s throat clicked. Gray still stained the corners of her lips.

“Does it stop hurting?”

“No.”

Emily flinched like the word had weight.

Lila did not add comfort to it. She let the no sit. The chains behind her shifted and a link kissed the floor.

“But it stopped being something I wanted to escape.”

Emily looked at the open hooks in Lila’s shoulders. At the pale face. At the tight red leather and the dark band at her throat.

“I was in that park for years. I watched them. I came when they turned the motors on. I hated it and then I needed it and then I died full of rock.” Her voice scraped. “If I say yes, is that the same as staying in the gold?”

“No,” Lila said. “The gold was a theft. This is a door. You walk through it, or you return to the death you already had. There is no third thing.”

Los merely watched. The question had already been put on the floor between them.

Emily looked at the two creatures before her. Wondering what it was like to be… that. Her hands were shaking. She lowered her gaze and looked at them like they still belonged to a statue.

“Yes.”

Lila almost smiled. “Then learn what you agreed to before you wear it.”

She stood and the chains rose with her. Her hands moved to open her leather outfit where it needed to. Breasts marked by the tight spiked bands at the base of each nipple. Lower, the old halo sat around the root of her clit, dark metal, the inner teeth a fine ugly ring. When she stepped in close Emily smelled iron and skin and the faint heat of a body that did not pretend to be warm in a human way.

“You are still meat,” Lila said. “If I put all of this on you at once you will break before you understand it. I will not be kind. I will be careful. Those are not the same.”

Emily nodded once. She did not know what else to do with a mouth that worked.

Lila kissed her.

It was not soft. Teeth. The taste of metal. Emily made a sound into it and Lila’s hand found her hair and held her there. A chain slid along Emily’s bare spine, only the edge of it, and opened a thin line from the nape down. Heat followed. Emily jerked and Lila’s other hand gripped her hip and kept her.

“That sequence,” Lila said against her mouth. “Pain. Then the other thing. Do not sort them. That is the habit that kept you small.”

She laid Emily back on the floor. The fresh cut smeared. Lila’s chains arranged themselves with a will of their own, not wrapping her full, not hauling her off the ground. One length crossed Emily’s ribs and bit just enough to hold. Another rested over her left thigh, barbs kissing skin.

Lila’s mouth went to her throat, then lower. She sucked a nipple until Emily’s back tried to leave the floor, then dragged the edge of a nipple-ring across it, cold and sharp. Emily cried out. Lila did it to the other side. When she lifted her head both peaks were wet and marked.

“You used to come because a machine decided you would,” Lila said. “This time you will come because I am on you.”

She put her knee between Emily’s legs and opened her. Emily was already wet. The body that had spent years clenched around metal did not know what to do with empty air and a living thigh. Lila looked down at her, at the ordinary pink of a cunt that had been stretched and gold-coated and packed, now just flesh again, twitching like it expected a pig.

Lila lowered herself.

Clit to clit.

The halo hit first. The tight band around Lila’s clit pressed its spiked inner face against Emily’s bare one. The bite was immediate, a ring of small teeth on her bare clit. Emily made a sound that was uniquely hers. At the same time the halo hummed. A low, pleasant vibration rode the sharp. Pain and a filthy sweet buzz in the same square inch.

“Fuck,” Emily gasped. “Fuck, that’s—”

“Yes,” Lila said, and rolled her hips.

She kept the pressure measured. Not her full weight. Not every chain. Just the halo grinding in small, vicious circles, spikes catching, vibration soaking through the catch. Emily’s hips tried to chase and tried to flee in the same motion. A chain at her thigh tightened and the barbs broke skin. She came on the second true grind, sudden, messy, a sob punched out of her while her cunt clenched on nothing.

Lila turned one hand so Emily could see the band at her wrist. Micro-spikes on the inside. A faint vibration in the metal, the same low hum as the halo between her legs.

“You have had machines,” Lila said. “You have had metal. You have had cement. You have not had this.”

She spat on her fingers and pushed two into Emily, slow enough to be cruel. The body remembered a thicker shape and still had to take this. Lila fucked her with her fingers while the halo kept its ugly kiss, spikes and hum, and leaned down to bite the side of Emily’s breast hard enough to leave marks. Emily’s second orgasm ran straight into the first. Her legs shook around Lila’s hips. Tears went into her hair.

“Look at me,” Lila said.

Emily did. White face. Black eyes. Chains shifting. A drop of Emily’s blood on Lila’s pale collarbone where a hook-wound had brushed her.

Lila’s fingers were already in her. She added a third. Emily’s body tried to remember the stretch of the middle pig and failed. This gave. This was warm. Knuckles. A pulse in Lila’s thumb.

“Breathe.”

Emily breathed. It came out a sound.

Four. Lila’s fingers tucked. She worked the widest part of her hand against Emily with small, patient pushes, not kind, not rushing. The rim burned in a way the crane never had. The crane had not cared if she opened. Lila waited for the open and then used it.

The fist went in.

Emily’s mouth broke on a cry. Her hands found Lila’s arms and held on like the floor had dropped. Her grip slid down to Lila’s wrist and hit metal.

The band there was the same make as the halo between Lila’s legs. Tight. Spiked on the inside. It bumped Emily’s clit and the stretched rim of her cunt every time Lila moved the fist even a tiny bit. Sharp on the outside. Wet heat on the inside.

Emily jerked. The band kissed her clit again and a broken sound came out of her that was not only pain.

“Wait,” she said. Then, worse, “Don’t. I want the rest. All of it. I can take it.”

Something moved in Lila’s face. A sort of fascination at the girl's words.

“You asked.”

She drove the fist deeper in one hard push. The wrist halo scraped over Emily’s clit, caught the rim, and shoved inside after the hand, fast and rough now that it had been invited. Emily screamed. The spiked ring seated against her walls. It did not cut. It pressed and hummed. The hum moved when Lila moved. Inside. In the place that had been untouched for years.

“Feel it.”

Emily did. She felt the spikes as a constant map. She felt Lila’s pulse through the back of the hand. She felt heat instead of metal, skin instead of the pig, and the pain sitting on top of that heat like it belonged there. She was flesh. She was taking a woman’s fist. She was going to come from it and she loved how simple that was.

“This is flesh,” Lila said. “Unyielding and soft.”

Los turned his head a fraction. That was as close as he came to approval.

She came around the hand with a sob that was not for an audience. Her cunt clenched on flesh and spikes and the hum. Lila held still through it, present, watching her face, and only started to move again when Emily’s eyes found her.

“Again,” Lila said. “While you can still tell the difference.”

She fucked her with the fist.

Not the careful feed from before. Long, grinding strokes that dragged the wrist halo along the front wall and seated it deep on every push. The spikes pressed a moving ring through her. The hum followed it. Emily’s legs tried to close and Lila’s chains caught her thighs and held them open without hauling her off the floor. Every inward shove knocked a sound out of her. Every outward drag made the band catch and remind her what she had asked for.

“You wanted all of it,” Lila said. She did not slow down. “Then take it while it is still a hand.”

Emily came a second time with the fist buried, harder than the first, cunt seizing around knuckles and metal, a raw broken noise tearing out of the mouth that had spent years around a feeding tube. Lila kept the hand in until the clench started to fail, then pulled out in one wet, ugly slide. The wrist halo scraped her clit on the way out and Emily jerked like she had been cut.

Lila replaced the hand with her thigh, then the clit halo, closer, meaner. She took Emily’s wrist and put it on one of the open hook wounds in her own side.

“Feel what I am. That does not come off. Yours will not either, once you choose the rest.”

Emily’s fingers sank into the wet edge of the wound. Lila’s breath changed subtly.

“This is the last time you will feel human,” she said. “Remember it. Then let it go.”

She ground the spiked clit halo against Emily’s raw, overshot peak until her own orgasm hit, a low sound through her teeth, a hard shudder that drove the micro-spikes in one last time. Emily felt that peak as a bright ugly pulse against nerves that had already been used up, and broke again, smaller, wrecked, holding the wound like a handle.

They stayed like that until Emily’s shaking dropped to a tremor.

Lila lifted off her. The halo left a perfect dotted ring of raw points around Emily’s clit, already swelling. Chain cuts on ribs and thigh. Bite on the breast. Mouth bruised. She lay in it breathing like she had forgotten how and then remembered all at once.

Lila stood. The leather closed. The chains found their hanging order. She walked a few steps into the corridor’s bad geometry and came back with something in her hands.

Gold.

Not a clean piece. The remnant of the face plate. Cracked through the cheek. Jagged at the brow. The mouth hole torn wider than it had been designed. The inner surface still held the shape of Emily’s face from the years it had been locked there. The eye screens were dead black pits.

Lila held it out.

“This is what brought you. Not your father’s love. Not the park. This. The thing that owned your face while they used the rest of you. Hell does not ask you to pretend it never happened. Hell asks you to wear the truth of it.”

Emily sat up. Her body protested in six places. She stared at the broken mask.

“If I put that on?”

“You accept the path that delivered you,” Lila said. “You accept Hell. You accept that the pain is not a mistake. That is freedom here. The other freedom is the death you already had, and whatever unknown lies beyond it.”

Los’s voice came from behind them, the same measured calm as the penthouse.

“Say yes and be free.”

Emily took the gold.

The edges cut her palms. She lifted it, lined the broken eye holes with her eyes, and pressed it to her face.

It was worse than the memory. The jagged rim bit into her temples and along her jaw. A crack found the bridge of her nose and opened it. The dead screens sat over her sight and for one sick second she thought the park feed would kick back on. It did not. She saw Lila through fractured gold and blood starting down her cheeks.

She pushed until the piece seated.

The sound she made was small and raw. Her hands stayed on the metal like they could keep it from going deeper. It went deeper anyway. The old shape remembered her. The new wounds made room.

She did not pull it off.

Lila watched the blood find the cracks and run.

“Good,” she said. “Now it is yours. Not his.”

Emily breathed through the mouth hole.

—

The apartment in the south of France was dark except for the bedroom.

Richard woke to the sound of the balcony door. He reached for the phone out of habit. The app that had once monitored his daughter was still a graveyard of flat lines.

Linda sat up beside him.

“Richard.”

Emily was already in the room.

The cracked gold mask covered her face, jagged at the brow and cheek, blood dried in the seams where she had forced it on. The rest of her had followed the mask. Skin split in fine gold fractures down her throat and over her shoulders and breasts, held by dark spikes driven through the breaks. Blood worked in the cracks when she breathed. She was barefoot on their floor. She looked like his sculpture had stood up and walked off the pedestal without the pigs.

Linda made a noise that was not a word.

Richard’s mouth opened and closed.

“Emily.”

“Dad. Mom. Hello.”

Her voice came through the torn mouth hole, calm, a little rough. She walked to the side of the bed. Linda scrambled back against the headboard. Richard couldn't force himself to move. He stared at the gold like a man recognizing his own handwriting.

“Do you remember when you left me sealed,” Emily said. “You said you loved me. You kissed the gold over my face and you walked away. It was awful. Somewhere under all of that I still loved you.”

Linda whispered, “oh god oh god,” and nobody answered her.

“I came to say thank you. You gave me something unique. The park. The years. The way it ended. I would not be this without your hands.”

Richard’s eyes shone. He looked like he wanted the sentence to stop on the thank you.

“But you broke rules you should not have. You built a door that was not a door and you put me through it without asking. I have to make that right.”

She took his face in her hands. The spikes at her wrists clicked softly. He tried to pull back and her strength was not a daughter’s strength. She held him the way the crane had held her, without hurry.

“I don’t hate you. I love you, daddy.”

She kissed him on the mouth.

The gold rim cut his lips. He made a muffled sound and then the cement came.

It poured from her in a thick, endless push, the same gray mass she had coughed onto hell's floor, the same material the maintenance crew had pumped into her until the screens went dark. It filled his mouth and kept coming. He gagged and clawed at her shoulders. His nails skipped off gold and spike. She did not break the kiss. She held the back of his head and fed it into him the way they had fed her, slow enough that he understood.

Linda screamed.

Richard’s throat worked. Gray welled at the corners of the kiss and ran down his chest. His legs kicked under the sheet. Emily stayed on his mouth until the kicking got weak and then until it stopped. When she let go he fell back against the pillows with his jaw slack and cement shining on his tongue. His eyes were still open.

Emily straightened. Blood moved in the cracks of her chest, unhurried.

She looked at Linda once. Then turned away without a word.

She walked out the way she had come, through the balcony air that was not balcony air anymore, and the room went very quiet except for Linda’s breathing, which was wrong, too fast, catching on the scream she had already used up.

Richard’s body lay motionless.

Linda sat with her husband’s body and the smell of wet rock and the dent in the mattress.

Then the chains.

Lila stepped out of the dark at the foot of the bed. Pale face. Red leather. The trailing metal whispering over tile. She looked at Richard the way she had looked at Belgrand, which was to say almost not at all, and then she looked at Linda.

Linda tried to crawl off the far side. A chain hooked the iron of the bedframe and another found her ankle and stopped her without lifting her. She was still in the bed. Still next to him.

“Please. Please I didn’t know she was— I didn’t—”

“You knew enough,” Lila said. “You rubbed the gold. You told him to turn the motors up. You said it was sad when the numbers stopped, and then you reached for him anyway.”

Linda shook her head hard enough that it looked like it hurt.

Lila’s head tilted. Something old and badly buried moved behind the white of her face.

“I tore out my humanity years ago by choice. But sometimes I still feel it.”

She leaned in. Linda went still. Lila licked her, slow, from the hinge of the jaw to the corner of the mouth, tasting salt and the sour of terror. Linda sobbed into it.

“Sometimes I give in to it.”

What happened after was full of moans, blood, and screams.

When it was over, Linda was on the floor. The sheets had come with her, heavy and dark with blood. Her mouth was ruined. A dotted raw ring sat over her clit where the halo had been seated and ground until the flesh around it was pulp. Chain cuts opened her breasts and the insides of her thighs. Hook marks in the meat of her shoulders went deeper than Lila’s own. She was not holding herself together. She was not doing anything. The eyes were open. Nothing behind them.

Lila stood over her, leather closed again, a smear of Linda on her mouth.

She looked once at the man with cement in his mouth and the woman opened on the floor, and the leftover feeling in her went quiet again, put back where she kept it.

Los appeared behind her. “She broke no rule.”

Lila looked down at Linda. “No.”

“She solved no Lexicon. There was no debt.”

“No.”

Los regarded the body, then her. “Then what was that?”

Lila considered the question. “Hunger.”

“For what?”

Her chains shifted softly behind her. Lila looked at Linda for another moment.

“For me.”

The tear in the air took them. The apartment stayed behind with its two bodies and the open balcony and the phone on the nightstand still full of a daughter’s old numbers, none of them rising.

Outside, the French night was ordinary.

Whatever came after belonged to the damned.